How to Package a Deadlock Skin Mod

What Skintel.gg reads out of your GameBanana submission when it builds your mod page, and the packaging choices that decide whether your mod renders in 3D.

Skintel.gg reads your GameBanana submission, downloads one archive from it, opens the VPK inside, and renders the model. Most of what makes that go well or badly is decided by you at upload time.

TL;DR

• Post in your hero’s own Skins subcategory, never the Skins root.
• Put a real .vpk inside the archive.
• Keep the base hero’s bone names so borrowed animations still play.
• Put your .vmdl_c under models/heroes_staging/<hero codename>/.
• Name the archive you want showcased YourMod_skintelgg.zip.
• Retextures: point .vmat_c and .vtex_c at the base hero’s own material paths.
• Put the clean hero shot first in the gallery. It becomes your card.
• Title the credit group Authors or Artists so co-authors get creator pages.
• Settle on a title before you publish. It becomes the URL and never changes.
• Ship zip, rar or 7z, under 1536 MiB, no symlinks.

Your subcategory decides the hero

The hero comes from the GameBanana subcategory you posted in. There is no title parsing and no tag heuristic behind it, so the subcategory is the whole signal.

Two things follow. A skin posted straight to the Deadlock Skins root, with no hero subcategory under it, never reaches Skintel.gg. A skin filed under the wrong hero lands on that hero’s page here, looking like someone else’s work.

Both are fixable. Move the submission into the right subcategory and the next poll of that hero picks it up, usually within six hours.

The archive needs a VPK inside it

Skintel.gg downloads one file from your submission, unpacks it, and looks for a .vpk anywhere in the tree. Around 430 mods in Skintel.gg’s catalog sit without 3D because the downloaded file had none in it.

What unpacks:

• zip, rar and 7z. Other formats stop the conversion.
• One archive inside another, one level deep. Nested any deeper it stays packed.
• Either pak01_dir.vpk or a plain mymod.vpk. Numbered chunks like pak01_002.vpk on their own do not work, because the _dir index is the openable half.
• No symlinks. An archive containing one is rejected before extraction.
• Up to 1536 MiB, the download cap, measured on the file itself.

Extra VPKs in the same archive are a feature: each becomes a selectable entry in the model picker on your page, up to six alongside the main one. A mod with no VPK still gets a page and a gallery, just no viewer.

Keep the base hero’s bone names

Mod skins arrive with no animation clips of their own, so the viewer loads the base hero’s clip library and plays it on your model. That works by name. A clip track targets a node, and a track whose node is missing is discarded.

Rename the rig and the clips land on nothing. When fewer than 20% of the borrowed tracks find a target, the viewer treats the rig as incompatible and drops the whole set, which leaves your model standing in bind pose. The thumbnail is rendered from the same load, so a bind-pose model is also the picture people see in the grid.

Cloth joints are excluded from that measurement, so a mod that omits them is not penalised for it. Everything else should keep the names the base hero uses.

Name the archive you want showcased

When a submission carries several archives, Skintel.gg picks the biggest one, which is a decent guess and sometimes the wrong one. Put _skintelgg in the filename of the archive you want showcased and Skintel.gg takes that one instead: WardenGoldTrim_skintelgg.zip.

The match is forgiving. Case does not matter, the separator does not matter, and it can sit anywhere in the name. It has to be a zip, rar or 7z, since a marked README leaves nothing to open. Mark two archives and the larger one wins.

Marking gets you three things: the archive you chose is the one Skintel.gg unpacks, renders, thumbnails and points the install button at; your conversion moves ahead of the rest of the mod queue; and your mod gets a lift in the default browse order, because a mod packaged this way shows up here the way its author meant it to. It has no effect on rarity, which is calculated from likes, views and downloads and stays that way.

Details that still change your page

• Put the .vmdl_c under models/heroes_staging/<hero codename>/. Skintel.gg excludes models/particle/ and maps/ helpers because they are not wearable models. A model at the archive root or under models/abilities can still be read as the mod’s main model. Pages have shipped showing a two-metre hammer instead of the hero.
• Retextures need their paths to match. With no .vmdl_c of your own, Skintel.gg bakes your materials over the base hero’s mesh, joining on path. A .vmat_c or .vtex_c at a path the base hero never uses has nothing to attach to.
• The first gallery image becomes your card. Skintel.gg pins it to GameBanana’s 530px variant for a roughly 450px card, so lead with a clean, readable shot of the hero rather than a wide comparison sheet.
• Credit group names decide creator pages. A group titled Authors, Creators, Modders, Artists or Contributors turns its members into credited creators with their own pages here. Special Thanks and Software Used stay plain text.
• Your title becomes your URL. Skintel.gg slugifies it at first ingest, caps it around 80 characters, and never rewrites it afterwards. Renaming later updates the displayed name and leaves the link where it was.
• Staying listed takes nothing. Fall out of your category listing for three consecutive polls, roughly 18 hours, and the page drops out of browse until the mod reappears. Uploading a new version bumps the update date, which is the signal to re-convert.

If your mod is already up

• Deadlock mod catalog to find your page and see what came through.
• Fix Deadlock skins that stopped working for the player-side questions you will get asked.
• Deadlock heroes for the hero pages your mod appears on.